On Distant Service

The Life of the First U.S. Foreign Service Officer to Be Assassinated

De: Susan M. Stein

Narrado por: Bryan Carmody

On July 18, 1924, a mob in Tehran killed US foreign service officer Robert Whitney Imbrie. His violent death, the first political murder in the history of the service, outraged the American people. Though Imbrie’s loss briefly made him a cause célèbre, subsequent events quickly obscured his extraordinary life and career.

Susan M. Stein tells the story of a figure steeped in adventure and history. Imbrie rejected a legal career to volunteer as an ambulance driver during World War I and joined the State Department when the United States entered the war. Assigned to Russia, he witnessed the October Revolution, fled ahead of a Bolshevik arrest order, and continued to track communist activity in Turkey even as the country’s war of independence unfolded around him. His fateful assignment to Persia led to his death at age 41 and set off political repercussions that cloud relations between the United States and Iran to this day. Drawing on a wealth of untapped materials, On Distant Service returns listeners to an era when dash and diplomacy went hand-in-hand.

©2020 Susan M. Stein (P)2022 Susan M. Stein

Robert Imbrie: On the front lines of history

I only listened to On Distant Service because I happened to meet the author while on a group trip in Iceland. I listened out of curiosity as this was her first book, which she researched and wrote after a long career as a teacher. I was pleasantly surprised by the experience, learned a lot, and can highly recommend this book. Yes, it is the story of Robert Whitney Imbrie who was killed in Tehren in 1924, but more than that, it is a story of the 10-year period (1914-1924) that dramatically reshaped eastern Europe and the world. It turns out that I knew virtually nothing about the Great War (WWI) and its aftermath. Through the experiences of Imbrie, Stein does a remarkable job of painting a dynamic picture of the global transformations occurring at that time. Imbrie was on the frontlines of many of these events. He was a volunteer ambulance driver in France during WWI, spent time in Russia during the Russian Revolution, found himself in Finland and Turkey tracking Bolshevik activity, and, finally, in Persia (today's Iran). Stein does a great job of writing a coherent story even though Imbrie's widow had all his personal writings and correspondence destroyed after his death.